If a piece of poetry or prose includes vivid color symbolism, we as readers have a window to better understand its layers of meaning. However, some colors have more nuanced symbolic meanings than others.
Purple is one of these colors. This rich shade has traditionally been associated with either sorrow or royalty and wealth, but it also has a very different meaning: some traditions associate purple with spirituality and enlightenment. In a similar vein, it’s also sometimes associated with outer space or the supernatural.
Fittingly, purple symbolism is often found in creative writing. Color symbolism is a great way to make a poem, short story, or novel more engaging and meaningful. And as we’ll see in a moment, you can use various shades of purple to evoke a range of meanings.
Purple Symbolism in Poetry
As a genre, poetry is all about economy of words. A good poet isn’t going to describe something as purple for no reason — if purple is in a poem, it’s serving a purpose. Here are four poems where purple color symbolism plays a significant role.
“Lavender” by Joanna Fuhrman (2021)
When you see the title of Joanna Fuhrman’s “Lavender,” you might imagine a quiet, pastoral poem that takes you to endlessly rolling fields of lavender. However, in this case, purple is being used symbolically.
As a reader, you aren’t left to decipher what the poem is trying to say or to wait until the end for everything to make sense. This is a poem that hits the ground running:
"Being in a funk" is what the cool people call it. It's the purple that surrounds the scene at the lake. Not sad enough to actually drown.
You’ve probably seen the color blue used as a symbol of sadness. But what about purple? It’s an unusual choice, but purple’s cool, brooding quality makes it seem like an appropriate choice for describing the color of a “funk.”
It’s worth noting that of all shades of purple, the author of the poem chooses lavender to represent being in a funk. But when you think about it, it makes sense. Just as a funk is a sadness (but not a completely devastating sadness), its corresponding color is purple (but not an overly deep or dark purple).
The end of the poem circles back to the beginning:
If Virginia Woolf had been in a funk, she would have filled her pockets with dead lilacs instead of rocks.
If you’re familiar with Virginia Woolf’s death by suicide, you know that she filled her pockets with rocks before walking into the River Ouse in the UK. The rocks helped pull her to the bottom of the river, where she drowned.
The beginning of the poem says that if you’re in a funk, you’re “not sad enough to actually drown.” Fittingly, even if Woolf had put dead lilacs in her pockets, she would have briefly been surrounded by purple in the water. Noticeably sad, but not dead. There’s a kind of unexpected wistfulness in this final stanza that stays with you long after the poem is done.
“Grief” by Matthew Dickman (2008)
“Grief” has one of the most distinctive opening lines of any modern poem: “When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla.” It’s a delightfully strange image, and as you’ll see when you read through the poem, it’s also arguably the poem’s strongest symbol.
Why is grief in the form of a purple gorilla? Much of the poem deals with the inexplicable nature of grief, and the purple gorilla captures the surreal, dreamlike (or more accurately, nightmare-like) feeling you get when grieving someone.
The surreal nature of the gorilla is underscored by other unexpected details — like “I play her favorite Willie Nelson album/because she misses Texas/but I don’t ask why.”
Matthew Dickman could have made the gorilla orange or blue or yellow, and any of those colors would give the reader a sense of the surreal. But in this case, purple is the most appropriate. It’s a color that has traditionally been associated with sorrow, and it’s also sometimes connected to the otherworldly or supernatural. The feeling of sorrow is central to the poem, but so is a sense of connection to the dead — a connection that often feels otherworldly.
It’s worth noting that black is another shade that’s often associated with death and mystery. But because real gorillas are black, making grief come to the speaker as a black gorilla wouldn’t give the poem the same surreal atmosphere.
“Hundreds of Purple Octopus Moms Are Super Weird, and They’re Doomed” by January Gill O’Neil (2019)
“Hundreds of Purple Octopus Moms Are Super Weird, and They’re Doomed” is an unusual poem. It’s playful and doesn’t take itself too seriously, but there’s a sober, powerful truth beneath that facade.
If the title isn’t enough to tell you that this poem doesn’t take itself too seriously, the epigraph should be. The poem opens with an excerpt from the Beatles song “Octopus’s Garden” — “I’d like to be under the sea/In an octopus’s garden in the shade.”
Readers then get to see a strange yet memorable image:
The article called it “a spectacle.” More like a garden than a nursery: hundreds of purple octopuses protecting clusters of eggs while clinging to lava rocks off the Costa Rican coast. I study the watery images: thousands of lavender tentacles wrapped around their broods.
There are two mentions of purple worth considering here. First, we see purple octopuses. Soon after, we zero in on their lavender tentacles. To really understand what the color symbolizes, we need to understand the poem’s general trajectory and its subtext.
At the poem’s outset, we see the speaker reading an article about mother octopuses guarding their eggs until they hatch — sometimes for more than four years. The speaker then shifts her focus to her teenage son, who sits next to her on the couch. The poem then moves into its final section, which can best be described as a meditation on parenthood:
Today, my heart sits with the brooding octomoms: not eating, always on call, always defensive, living in stasis in waters too warm to sustain them. No guarantees they will live beyond the hatching. Not a spectacle but a miracle any of us survive.
In these final lines, we see the sometimes-unexpected connections we have with the rest of the natural world. As a species, we as humans don’t initially seem to have much in common with octopuses. However, through the poem, we see that both octopus and human mothers have an intense focus on the well-being of their offspring — often to the point of self-sacrifice.
So how does purple come into play? Purple is a shade connected to sorrow and emotional pain, and the poem captures the pain that mothers (both human and octopus) are willing to endure to give their offspring the best possible chance at life. For the octopus mothers, that pain involves cradling eggs while holding tightly to slippery rocks. For human mothers (or at least for our speaker), it looks like weathering the many stages of child development (“The teenage shell is hard to crack”) and the ups and downs of being a parent.
After the initial image of the many, many purple octopus moms, we see a more specific shade of purple: “thousands of lavender tentacles/wrapped around their broods.” Lavender is a softer, floral-inspired shade of purple, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s used here. Its gentleness makes it a fitting color to use for the tentacles — the arms cradling the eggs and protecting them from harm.
“Purple” by Kwame Dawes (2019)
“Purple” by Kwame Dawes has a lot of similarities to “Hundreds of Purple Octopus Moms Are Super Weird, and They’re Doomed,” both in terms of color and theme. On the surface, it’s a short and simple piece. The speaker, on a walk with his daughter, picks a spray of purple flowers. He notices that the flowers smell like “minty honey, a perfume so aggressively/pleasant,” so he reaches his fingers toward his daughter to smell. She pulls away as if she’s been offered something unpleasant, a “palm full of wasps,/deceptions.”
The poem “Purple” was chosen for the 2022 Dear Poet Project, where students write letters to a poet. In a letter addressed to the students who had written to him, Dawes explained that it was a real interaction with his daughter that inspired the poem:
As you might have suspected, the poem is based on an actual incident with my daughter, Akua…The incident happened when she was at university, and we had gone for a walk through some public gardens. I saw the lavender shrub and was drawn to it. I rubbed the leaves and put my fingers to my nose, expecting that sweet, minty scent that filled me. I wanted her to experience the same, so I reached for her, and she pulled away. I think she thought I was playing a practical joke on her. It was a natural reaction, but it also taught us something about trust.
The final stanza of the poem captures the father’s immense love for his daughter and his commitment to protecting her:
This is the promise I make to you: I will never give you a fist full of wasps, just the surprise of purple and the scent of rain.
“Purple” is only 12 lines long, but it mentions the color purple four times (not including the title). As anyone who enjoys poetry knows, each word in a poem is there for a reason — so if “purple” appears four separate times in a short poem, it’s something to pay attention to.
What symbolic purpose is purple serving here? The usual interpretations — purple as a symbol of sorrow or of the otherworldly/supernatural — don’t really seem applicable. This poem centers on the relationship between a father and his daughter, and the color purple (like the sweet scent of lavender) becomes a kind of shorthand for the love between them.
That symbolism is made especially clear in the beginning. When the speaker wants his daughter to smell the lavender, he doesn’t hold out a spray of flowers — he extends his purple-stained fingers. The central symbol in the poem isn’t lavender flowers — it’s the color purple itself.
The final stanza underscores that symbolism. In the letter he wrote for the Dear Poet Project, Dawes explained that the final lines were an allusion to “the Biblical account in which fatherhood is defined as a relationship in which a father would not give a child a snake when he has been asked for a fish.” When you read that last stanza again, the parallels are clear:
This is the promise I make to you: I will never give you a fist full of wasps, just the surprise of purple and the scent of rain.
Like the father in the Biblical account, the speaker would never do his daughter harm (by giving her a metaphorical snake or fist full of wasps). Instead, he promises to only give her love and support (as symbolized by the metaphorical fish and “the surprise of purple and the scent of rain”).
Purple Symbolism in Prose
Poetry isn’t the only genre where we see purple color symbolism. This intense and memorable shade has been popping up in short stories and novels for centuries. Here are a few examples of the color purple in various types of prose.
“The Purple Pileus” by H.G. Wells (1896)
“The Purple Pileus” is a strange short story by H.G. Wells, an author who might be better known for works like The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. “Pileus” is the technically correct name for the cap of a mushroom or toadstool. So as you may have gathered, “The Purple Pileus” centers on mysterious purple mushrooms.
At the story’s outset, we see shopkeeper Mr. Coombes walking into the woods after having a fight with his wife. The opening line — “Mr. Coombes was sick of life” — gives us a good idea of the protagonist’s mental state. We learn that the fight arose because his wife had had two people over (as she often did on Sundays). One of the visitors was Jennie, his wife’s obnoxiously loud friend. The other was Mr. Clarence, Jennie’s equally obnoxious fiance.
Sunday is a day of rest in the rural part of England where Mr. Coombes lives, and he’s frustrated by the noise — he’d much rather have a quiet, relaxing day at home. He ultimately leaves and heads out to the woods. Mr. Coombes is so dissatisfied with his life that he considers ending it by suicide. But that changes when he sees a flash of purple that he initially thinks might be a leather purse:
He saw that it was the purple top of a fungus, a peculiarly poisonous-looking purple: slimy, shiny, and emitting a sour odour. He hesitated with his hand an inch or so from it, and the thought of poison crossed his mind. With that he picked the thing, and stood up again with it in his hand.
In this moment, Mr. Coombes is curious, and he doesn’t necessarily care if he dies. We see that he knows these strange purple mushrooms are poisonous: “They were wonderful things these fungi, thought Mr. Coombes, and all of them the deadliest poisons, as his father had often told him. Deadly poisons!”
Mr. Coombes soon reaches a strange sort of high from the mushrooms. When he arrives back home, he seems gentle and quiet at first. However, he soon becomes aggressive to the point of violence. He rushes Mr. Clarence, upends a table, and even tries to force-feed his guest one of the mushrooms.
The story jumps five years ahead to a time when a happier, more confident Mr. Coombes is walking with his brother. He recounts what happened with the mushrooms years earlier, but he reveals that it was a transformative experience. He says his wife had been unwilling to help him with his business, and she brought so many guests over that she became disrespectful:
You’d hardly think it, but she was downright extravagant, and always having slaps at me. I was a bit too easy and loving, and all that, and she thought the whole blessed show was run for her. Turned the ‘ouse into a regular caravansery, always having her relations and girls from business in, and their chaps. Comic songs a’ Sunday, it was getting to, and driving trade away. And she was making eyes at the chaps, too! I tell you, Tom, the place wasn’t my own.
He then says women like his wife don’t respect their husbands unless they’re at least somewhat afraid. He says he attacked Mr. Clarence to show his wife what he could do, and that she has been respectful of him ever since.
Clearly, the purple mushrooms represent a pivotal point in Mr. Coombes’s life. Why are they purple? The color is mentioned in the title, which is a good sign that it’s important to the story. In this case, purple is a symbol of the supernatural or the surreal. It’s fitting — the purple mushrooms have strange effects on Mr. Coombes, and in the end, his life changes forever.
For Mr. Coombes, that change opens up the doors to a whole new world of freedom. There’s another symbol here that supports that reading: the use of “pileus” instead of “mushroom.” The word is likely a nod to a hat worn by freed slaves in ancient Rome. The hat is also called a pileus, and many coins throughout history have featured an image of someone wearing a pileus as a symbol of freedom.
“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker (1982)
“The Color Purple” is a classic novel that deals with themes of racism and misogyny — and more specifically, with the subjugation of Black women in early 1900s America. One of the main characters in the novel, Celie, is beaten and raped by her father when she is still a child. She then marries a man who treats her the same way. Celie is not the only woman in the story who suffers from physical and sexual abuse. However, the trajectory of her life best embodies the themes in the novel.
Celie begins a romantic and sexual relationship with Shug Avery, a woman with a career as a blues and jazz singer. The title of the book comes from something Shug says to Celie: “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” Throughout the novel, it becomes clear that purple is a symbol of the hope, empowerment, and resilient spirit of so many Black women of the time.
Just as a person walking by a field might stop to take in the sight of purple flowers, Celie gradually becomes more aware of her own self-efficacy. It’s a journey of enlightenment and self-discovery, and readers are guided through it by brief bursts of purple — you might think of them like blazes guiding hikers along a trail.
Based on its importance in the novel, there are fewer appearances of purple here than you might think. The first one is when Celie is in a store with Kate, her husband’s sister. As Celie surveys the store’s selection of dresses, she thinks about which one she should get:
I think what color Shug Avery would wear. She like a queen to me so I say to Kate, Somethin purple, maybe little red in it too. But us look an look and no purple. Plenty red but she say, Naw, he won’t want to pay for red. Too happy lookin. We got choice of brown, maroon or navy blue. I say blue.
This incident is symbolic of the beginning of Celie’s empowerment and freedom. It comes before Shug talks to Celie about the color purple. In the store, we see how inspired Celie is by Shug — and more importantly, we start to see the connection between purple and individual liberation. But just as there are no purple dresses in the store, Celie is not yet ready to embrace her strength and extricate herself from her abusive marriage.
Purple next appears when Shug speaks what is arguably the book’s most famous quote to Celie: “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” Fittingly, in the same conversation, Shug eloquently discusses how men’s control of women can be stifling — and offers Celie some advice on how to move toward freedom:
You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a’tall. Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain’t. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up flowers, wind, water, a big rock.
But this hard work, let me tell you. He been there so long, he don’t want to budge. He threaten lightening, floods and earthquakes. Us fight. I hardly pray at all. Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it.
Shug’s words get through to Celie, and Celie eventually leaves her husband, moves from Georgia to Tennessee, and begins working for herself sewing pants. In a letter to Nettie, her sister, Celie mentions that she’s making a pair of pants for Sofia (her former sister-in-law). One leg of the pants is purple, and the other one is red. It’s an image reminiscent of Celie’s dress-shopping trip earlier in the book, and it suggests that Sofia might be able to free herself, too.
Later on, Celie mentions that the room she’s living in is almost all red and purple. This final, meaningful picture shows us how far Celie has come from being the timid young woman in the dress shop.
“The Purple Dress” by O. Henry (1907)
Like many of O. Henry’s stories, “The Purple Dress” focuses on the joys and hardships of young working women in New York City. It revolves around the women employed at the Bee-Hive Store. Each year, the owner of the store hosts a Thanksgiving dinner for his employees. All 10 of the women who work at the store are smitten with Mr. Ramsay, the head clerk. So when the annual Thanksgiving dinner approaches, they start planning what dresses they’ll wear.
The narrator notes that two girls — Grace and Maida — are especially invested in impressing Mr. Ramsay with their dresses. The women seem to disagree on whether Mr. Ramsay prefers purple or red, so Grace chooses a ready-made red dress, and Maida chooses a custom-made purple one.
The story takes an unexpected turn when it focuses on a good deed. Grace is someone who’s fairly self-involved, and she loves to show off. She spends her last few dollars on her dress, deciding to pay the rent she owes the following week.
However, the landlady locks her out of her room and tells her she has to leave. Maida lives in the same house, and she gives Grace the money she owes. However, that means that Maida doesn’t have the money to pick up her own dress. She was so set on wearing purple to the dinner that she decides not to go at all. Grace seems unaware of the sacrifice Maida has made for her, and that just adds to Maida’s disappointment.
Maida later makes her way over to the dressmaker’s store to tell the owner she can’t afford to pay for the dress. But this is where her good deed is unexpectedly rewarded. The dressmaker says he knows she will pay when she can, and he lets her take the dress. Maida puts on the dress and walks out of the store. The narrator tells us that she’s too happy with the dress to even notice the rain:
Ladies who shop in carriages, you do not understand. Girls whose wardrobes are charged to the old man’s account, you cannot begin to comprehend–you could not understand why Maida did not feel the cold dash of the Thanksgiving rain.
At five o’clock she went out upon the street wearing her purple dress. The rain had increased, and it beat down upon her in a steady, wind-blown pour. People were scurrying home and to cars with close-held umbrellas and tight buttoned raincoats. Many of them turned their heads to marvel at this beautiful, serene, happy-eyed girl in the purple dress walking through the storm as though she were strolling in a garden under summer skies.
Ultimately, by the end of the story, Maida is rewarded with even more good karma. Mr. Ramsay sees her and is impressed. He compliments her and asks if he may accompany her: “And of all the girls I ever knew, you show the greatest sense and intelligence. There is nothing more healthful and invigorating than braving the weather as you are doing. May I walk with you?”
The purple color symbolism in “The Purple Dress” is memorable and unconventional. Typically, purple is a symbol of luxury and decadence. Maida isn’t wealthy, and she can’t afford many luxuries. As O. Henry suggests (“Ladies who shop in carriages, you do not understand…”), the purple dress might not even seem like a luxury to someone well-off. But for Maida, the dress (as well as the kindness of the shop owner) is one of the few luxuries she can enjoy.
Maida’s walking through the rain while wearing the dress is also symbolic. She is so overjoyed with the dress that she barely notices the rain and cold. Similarly, little blessings like the dress are enough to help her weather the challenges of poverty.
“On the Sidewalk Bleeding” by Evan Hunter (1956)
Evan Hunter’s “On the Sidewalk Bleeding” might be short, but it’s an incredibly poignant piece. It chronicles the death of Andy, a 16-year-old boy who has joined a gang called the Royals. He has just been given a symbol of membership: a purple jacket with “The Royals” emblazoned across the back and his name embroidered on the front.
Andy may be proud of the jacket, but it’s what ultimately leads to his demise. The story begins with Andy lying down in an alley in the rain — we learn he has just been stabbed by a member of the Guardians, a rival gang, purely because he’s a Royal.
Andy hopes that someone in the alley will help him. However, the first person who stops is a man so intoxicated he just thinks Andy is drunk, and he doesn’t even realize he’s been cut. A young couple comes upon him, but they ultimately decide to leave him alone because they’re afraid of the rival gang. It’s then that Andy has a kind of epiphany:
And he wondered suddenly if the Guardians who had ambushed him and knifed him had ever once realized he was Andy? Had they known that he was Andy or had they simply known that he was Royal wearing a purple silk jacket? Had they stabbed him, Andy, or had they only stabbed the jacket and the title and what good was the title if you were dying?
After that realization, Andy becomes determined to remove the purple jacket if it’s the last thing he does. To him, the jacket has lost all of its importance: “The knife had not been plunged in hatred of Andy. The knife hated only the purple jacket. The jacket was a stupid meaningless thing that was robbing him of his life.”
In the end, Andy is able to remove the jacket before he succumbs to his wounds. His girlfriend, Laura, finds him and looks for a police officer. The sad irony is that the officer who comes to take the report of his death only recognizes him as a Royal. Laura tells the officer, “His name is Andy,” but the officer ignores her, saying “A Royal” out loud as he writes the report.
Ultimately, it’s Andy’s association with the Royals — an association that brought him a sense of belonging and a great deal of pride — that leads to his demise. But why make the jacket purple?
In this particular story, purple is the perfect symbolic color for the jacket. Two of purple’s main symbolic associations — prestige and sorrow — apply here. At the story’s outset, we see how proud Andy was to be a Royal. The gang clearly enjoys some prestige, so purple is an appropriate color for Andy’s jacket. Of course, purple is also associated with royalty, so the author’s choice of color is especially fitting.
However, as the story continues, we get a sense of Andy’s sorrow. He realizes he is going to die at 16, and he mourns the fact that his life is ending before he truly gets a chance to live it.
Experience the Magic of Purple
Purple is a shade whose inherent mystery adds a new layer of beauty to any piece of literature. Any time you see it, you can be assured it’s not there by accident — its rich symbolism is intended to guide your interpretation and make your experience of a novel, short story, or poem that much more vivid.
Continue exploring and discover what all the other colors mean in literature.
